


A Cup of Cold Water

by margdean56



Series: Great Water Holt Stories [4]
Category: Elfquest
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Great Water Holt, New Hope, Peysol/Lake, Tower Mountain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-08
Updated: 2012-09-08
Packaged: 2017-11-13 20:23:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/margdean56/pseuds/margdean56
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't have to be a healer to help someone heal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Cup of Cold Water

**Author's Note:**

> This is also a Tower Mountain/New Hope story, but since it's set at Great Water Holt, I'm putting it here for now.

NH 1 / GW 71

A stranger to the holt, Halfmoon thought, the moment he saw the group of three elves approaching his hometree. Somehow you could always tell. It wasn't only that he didn't remember seeing the tall, slender elf who walked at Windrunner's side, topping him by a couple of handspans. Between the size of Great Water Holt and the fact that they often welcomed wandering elves into their midst, there were those of his own tribesfolk whom Halfmoon mightn't have been able to identify at a single glance, and they came in all shapes and sizes. Though the elves of Great Water more often wore leather than woven cloth, the stranger's light belted tunic, loose, knee-length trousers, rope sandals and wide-brimmed straw hat did not stand out that much. He had a carrypack slung over his shoulder, but that was not unusual either.

It was the way he looked around, Halfmoon decided after a moment. Though the strange elf was obviously attending to what Windrunner said, turning frequently toward him, nodding, or making a brief reply, just as often his gaze was elsewhere: first one side, then another, down toward the ground, up into the overhanging branches of the trees, trying to take in everything.

The third elf in the group was unmistakable, however, and it was Seahawk's presence close by the tall elf's other side that gave Halfmoon his first real clue as to where the stranger might have come from.

A moment later Windrunner hailed him and motioned him over. The chieftain's next words confirmed Halfmoon's guess. "Halfmoon, this is Peysol. He's come with Seahawk from New Hope to discuss trading possibilities. Peysol, this is Halfmoon, our senior healer."

"A pleasure to meet you, Halfmoon."

The healer looked up as the other elf tipped back the wide brim of his straw hat. Eyes the brilliant blue of a summer sky smiled down at Halfmoon from a delicately featured face framed by hair the color of sunlight.

_I know that face._

Surprise made him speak before thinking; and anyway, Halfmoon had never been one to mince words. "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

Peysol's fair brows rose. "I don't believe so." He regarded the healer doubtfully. "You weren't one of the Great Water elves who were at Tower Mountain a couple of years ago, were you? I think I would have remembered..."

"No, I've never been there. Just heard about it." Halfmoon's grimace complemented the slight wince from the former Tower elf.

"You have met my son," Peysol offered, covering the uncomfortable moment quickly before anyone else could speak. "Frith. In fact, one reason I wanted to meet you was so I could thank you for your kindness to him while he and Kiriel and Kela were here."

Halfmoon chuckled. "Oh, I remember Frith, all right. Your son, is he? But that wasn't where..."

"Why, my good friend," Seahawk interrupted, "is not the answer to this puzzlement as clear as a crystal spring? Surely Dove must have spoken of you to her mentor, here." He indicated Halfmoon with a flourishing gesture.

Peysol shook his head. "No, Seahawk, I don't think she can have. Dove told me she barely spoke at all of her life in the Tower to anyone at Great Water. You should know that. If she confided in anyone it would have been you and Feather, and you hadn't even heard of the Tower before you fell afoul of it. And she hasn't been back here that much since the decision was made to found New Hope. Though I suppose it's possible..." He looked inquiringly at Halfmoon. But the healer had already made the connection.

_Dove. Lake. The one who—it's him!_

"I think you're partly right, Seahawk," Halfmoon said slowly. "It wasn't anything Dove told me, but..." He looked intently at Peysol again. The blond elf's face showed nothing but politely masked non-comprehension. Halfmoon came to a decision. "My chief, do you happen to know where Ceti is this afternoon?"

"She and Thorn are down at the beach mending nets, I think," Windrunner answered. "Why?"

"Humor me. I'd like for her to meet Peysol too." _See if she has the same reaction I did._

Windrunner and Seahawk exchanged puzzled looks before the chief flipped his bangs out of his eyes with a characteristic toss of his head, then looked up at their visitor. "Would you mind?"

"Not at all. Should I leave these herb samples Dove sent, or—?"

"Why don't you just leave the whole carrypack in Halfmoon's hometree? We'll be coming back here, I think." Windrunner glanced at the healer for confirmation.

Halfmoon nodded. "No one will meddle with it there. My lifemate's gone off hunting with BlackTalon this afternoon, you may remember."

The four elves had to cross a fair bit of the holt to get to the beach from Halfmoon's hometree. Unsurprisingly they drew a good deal of attention from the various elves they passed. Some called out greetings to Seahawk, which were exuberantly returned; some merely looked up from their tasks to follow the group with their eyes. Not all the looks were friendly, Halfmoon noted. Word traveled fast. Only a few of the elves of Great Water had actually been to Tower Mountain. Many more had heard the horror stories around the Council fires, and all too many were ready to take such stories for truth and apply them indiscriminately. Peysol noticed, too. Though his face was set in an expression of pleasant neutrality, Halfmoon caught more than once the flicker of discomfort in his eyes when a particularly poisonous glance was aimed at him. Seahawk managed to intercept some of these and return a challenging glare of his own, but he could not watch every direction at once. Halfmoon saw that he stayed close by Peysol's side.

Ceti and Thorn, sitting cross-legged in the sand with fishnets across their laps, both looked up in surprise to see the chief and his companions coming toward them across the beach. Seahawk immediately hailed Thorn and began asking questions about the _Dolphin's Smile_ and how the fishing had been this season. Meanwhile, Halfmoon watched Ceti closely as Windrunner introduced Peysol. Sure enough, he saw the question come into the younger healer's face even before she said hesitantly, "This is going to sound silly, but ... I have the oddest feeling I've seen you before. Isn't that strange? I know I can't have."

Her green gaze followed Peysol's surprised glance over his shoulder at Halfmoon. The senior healer locksent two words to Ceti: **Lake's healing.** There was the briefest of pauses before Ceti's hand flew to her mouth, startled realization dawning in her face.

Windrunner saw Ceti's reaction too, and cocked an eye at Halfmoon. "All right, is that what you wanted? Would you mind explaining what this is all about?"

"Back at my hometree. I have a skin of cider I've been saving ... and this isn't something to blab to the holt."

 

"Before I start," Halfmoon said, when the four of them were seated more or less comfortably in his hometree with leather mugs of cider in their hands, "I wonder if Peysol would mind telling me how he met Dove. I gather you'd call her a ... friend?"

Peysol nodded. "A very dear friend."

"But you would have first known her as Lake, while she was living in Tower Mountain."

"Yes. In fact, I suppose I was one of the first to... Well. It all started the day Jand and Malra—two of our hawkriders—came to my workroom with this 'most unusual Outsider' they'd captured." His eyes came up to meet Halfmoon's. "They caught her rooting through the garbage heap outside the humans' barracks. Ragged, filthy, starving ... they cleaned her up a bit before they brought her to me. And—not rational. She reacted more like a frightened little animal than an elf, at first. Yet, despite all that, she was one of the most beautiful elves I had ever seen. So tiny and delicate ... and those eyes."

"A lot of people find those eyes unsettling," Halfmoon commented.

Peysol shook his head, a reminiscent smile on his lips. "Like a dawn sky, or the curled insides of shells... Well. Jand and Malra's idea was to present her to Lord Tyaar, and they wanted me to provide suitable clothing, that being my specialty. I did that. I fed her, bathed her, dressed her elegantly—oh, like a little queen, she was!—and sent her to Tyaar. I ... couldn't think of anything else to do for her. If she'd gone back Outside she would have been dead within a moon. I didn't want that to happen. Also I knew that Tyaar could be generous toward those who pleased him. And he was very pleased with his ... gift."

"That was hardly the last you saw of her, though, I would imagine."

"Oh, no! Even before Tyaar decided to awaken her mind, she was often in my workroom after that, being fitted for new clothing. She always seemed to enjoy the attention—and the conversation, though I did all the talking. And afterwards, after Tyaar began training her as his consort, he asked my lovemate Leravie and me to tutor Lake in the social graces. That meant she practically lived with us for almost a year. When she wasn't with Tyaar, of course.”

"Being turned into the 'Lake' we all knew and loved," Windrunner put in wryly.

Peysol stiffened and Seahawk opened his mouth to voice a protest. Halfmoon struck in quickly, "And how did you feel about that?"

"About Lake? About what Tyaar was molding her into? I was appalled, of course—though it wasn't till much later that I had any real concept of what Tyaar had done to her ... how much of her personality was his work. But there wasn't anything I could do about it."

"So you began to see less of her, then."

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Peysol asked, surprised.

"If you were appalled by what she was becoming—"

"No, no, you don't understand! I was appalled by some of the things Lake did, yes—and the thought of what she might do. But that didn't change the way I felt about her, or my pleasure in her company. Some of my other friends did some pretty appalling things around that time, too, remember."

"So I've gathered," Halfmoon said dryly. "One more question. How did you feel about meeting Dove?"

Peysol's face lit. "Amazed—and delighted. Amazed that she'd managed to survive on her own, Outside, after she left the Tower; delighted that she'd found ... healing. A lifemate, a family, friends. And privileged, to be a part of that now myself, however small."

Halfmoon nodded. "All right. Now I think I can tell you how I knew your face." The healer took a meditative sip of the cider in his mug, then looked up at Peysol again. "You talked about Dove finding healing. How much has she told you about that?"

The blond elf shrugged. "I know that it happened here. That Seahawk rescued her from some place called the Mist Marsh, and that he and Feather convinced everyone that she should be healed rather than ... executed. And that she Recognized Raventongue afterwards."

"But she hasn't spoken much of the healing itself." Peysol shook his head. "Well, she probably doesn't remember, consciously, most of what went on. Has she ever mentioned how long it took us?"

"No, I don't believe so."

"Two full moons. That's two moons of nearly continuous healing, with four of us working in relays: Tinker, Soulsight, Ceti, and myself."

For a heartbeat or two Peysol looked astonished. Then he grimaced. "I suppose I shouldn't find that so surprising, considering that Tyaar worked on her for more like two years. Not continuously, but still..."

"That may have been part of the problem," Halfmoon acknowledged, "though we didn't know that at the time. But usually even when there's been massive damage to an elf's body or mind ... well, the best way to explain it is that health, wholeness, is something the body _wants_. So as a healer, you're working with your patient to restore something that's been temporarily put wrong. Lake was different. I'm not sure she'd been what any of us would call normal since the day she was born. What I do know is that at least some of the things that were wrong with Lake had been that way for many years—so long that they had in a way become normal for her. At least, that's what her healer's senses told her—and as you know, she's a very powerful healer."

"So her own powers were working against you rather than with you," Peysol said in a low voice.

"Exactly. That was the first obstacle. And once we'd got over that, there was the mind-healing still to be done."

Halfmoon paused, then directed a penetrating look at Peysol. "Now, I don't want you to think we went into Lake's mind and played toss-stones with her memories. Not only weren't they any of our business, but they wouldn't have been particularly helpful. What we were looking for was patterns. I'm not sure how to describe this, but individual memories and experiences tend to create patterns in the mind."

"Like individual threads in a tapestry," Peysol supplied. "I'm a weaver," he added with a brief smile.

"All right, that's as good an image as any. Experience, memory, and knowledge build up the concepts we have of things like right and wrong, good and evil. Trust. Friendship. Love. Those were the patterns we had to find in Lake's psyche somewhere, so that on some level we could say to her, 'This is good, this is healthy, this is the way you want to be.'"

Again the healer paused, then said in a lower voice, "There wasn't very much there for us to work with. Bits and pieces. Bare outlines. Things learned by rote rather than lived. Stronger patterns that were warped in some way. That poor child. There hadn't been much love in her life up till then, or friendship, or trust."

"But surely ... her parents?" Peysol said hesitantly. "Was she an orphan?"

"We don't know," Windrunner spoke up. The chief flipped the bangs out of his eyes as if to be able to see more clearly into the past. "She came to Great Water—the Old Holt, that is—when she was maybe eight? Eight and four? She was so tiny it was hard to tell—with two elves she called her parents. But I remember One-Ear saying he'd talked to them and they weren't, really. According to their story, she was a 'bad-luck child' who'd been foisted on them at the same time they were sent away from their own holt. They brought her up out of a sense of duty and ... oh, a certain basic respect for life, I suppose you'd say. But I don't remember ever seeing one of them hug her, or cuddle her, or comfort her when she'd been crying, or—High Ones, even smile at her. Anything like that."

"Is that so?" said Halfmoon. "What happened to them eventually?"

"They died in the Sickness. They distrusted magic, and they wouldn't let a healer near them. Lake disappeared soon after that, I think. At least by the time I was on my feet again after my own bout of Sickness, she was gone."

"Poor child," Peysol echoed softly. "Not much to build on."

"Not much," Halfmoon agreed. "But not nothing. As I said, there were bits and pieces and outlines. And the occasional stronger pattern—ongoing relationships she'd had herself. Those tended to have images of people associated with them—mannerisms, tones of voice ... faces."

Seahawk's head came up. He stared hard at Halfmoon for several heartbeats, then turned an intense sapphire gaze on Peysol. "That, then, was where you had seen my friend—Dove's friend—before."

"In Lake's mind. Yes. Ceti remembered too, you noticed." Halfmoon met the weaver's astonished eyes and said deliberately, "One of the strongest, truest, _healthiest_ patterns we found had your face. Your friendship with her, the love and acceptance you gave freely. Without it or something like it in her past, Lake's healing might not have been possible. I think you have the right to know that."

The shock and wonder in Peysol's face gradually gave way to a flush of embarrassment. "I—I'm not sure what to say. I'm honored, of course, and I thank you. But compared with everything else—" He made a vague gesture that seemed to encompass Tyaar's manipulations, Seahawk's gallantry, Feather's determination, Halfmoon's own skill and patience, Raventongue's protection. "—it seems ... so small a thing."

"Maybe so. But you never know how deeply even a chance encounter may affect someone." Halfmoon flicked a sidelong glance at Seahawk, who was suddenly blushing far more hotly than Peysol. "Giving someone a drink of water may be no more than a passing kindness. But to a person dying of thirst it might mean the difference between life and death."

Peysol studied the drink in his cup for a time, his face thoughtful. Finally he looked over at Seahawk. "You won't mention this to Dove, I hope."

Seahawk reached over to clasp the weaver's shoulder. "My friend, can there be any doubt that she is already aware of it—if not with her waking mind, then surely in her heart of hearts? If her deepest inmost self does not know you for her true, steadfast, and beloved friend, why then, she has not half the intelligence and perspicacity with which I have previously believed her to be endowed. Why, therefore, should I seek to reveal to her a truth which will seem the merest platitude?"

"I think that means ‘no’," quipped Windrunner. He put down his mug and got to his feet. "Well, I still have some people to talk to before Council tonight, and you two have unloading to do after you deliver those herb samples to Halfmoon. You'll be staying in Seahawk's old place, is that right?" Peysol nodded. "I'll come find you later, then."

Peysol pulled his carrypack over, and removed several cloth-wrapped bundles of dried herbs tied with different colors of thread. Sorting through these and passing on Dove's instructions about them occupied him and Halfmoon for some time before Peysol and Seahawk also rose to go. Before they took their leave, the healer touched the weaver's arm. **Not everyone's going to understand,** he sent privately. **You've already noticed that. Not all of them have even gotten around to accepting Lake. But she—Dove—is someone I care for a good deal. If _you_ happen to need a friend ... I'll be here.**

Blue eyes met blue, and both smiled. **Thank you. I'll remember that.**

Halfmoon watched Peysol cross the holt with Seahawk at his side. As he walked, he still looked all around him, taking in the sights of an unfamiliar place. But Halfmoon could no longer think of him as a stranger.


End file.
